Adding Asset Performance Management for Refinery Reliability

Emerson’s Richard Barnes provides perspectives on an asset reliability project on which he’s working with a European refinery’s project team.

A week ago, I had the pleasure of sitting by the beach, on the coast of the Black Sea, having an early breakfast before heading off to a refinery to assist a client in implementing their Asset Performance Management (APM) solution. The solution was based upon HART and Foundation fieldbus (FF) field devices commissioned into a DeltaV control system.

Within the DeltaV system is AMS Device Manager, both a tool in its own right through device configuration, diagnostics, calibration, documentation and the field oriented datasource for the APM. The APM, at this phase, is also coupled to an IBM MAXIMO Asset Management platform—their Computerised Maintenance Management System.

The project team has implemented four major areas of their plant: Mild HydroCracker, Sulphur Recovery, Hydrogen and this current phase is on the Coker. The all-important workflow is for the device to self-check and raise a flag upon detection of a problem with itself or the process/environment.

This diagnostic flag will be scanned by the AMS Alert Monitor and will be propagated to APM. Within APM, the active alert can be reviewed in relation to other active alerts, work order history and Asset Criticality Ranking.

Where action is required either immediate or planned, a Recommendation is created around the alert event and a Notification selected. The Notification will propagate into the Service Requests within MAXIMO, to be scheduled and resourced for a Corrective Maintenance Work Order. The CM WO will follow their tried and tested path for Work Permit/Haz Op/Toolbox Talk etc., supplemented by detail provided by the smart device’s electronic device description (EDD) for the device and supplementary information added if required during the Recommendation step.

As part of the overall project plan, this has all been tested on Development systems. Finalisation of this into Production systems is ongoing but should be compete by the end of this month or early July.

The refinery team has plans for future enhancements, which include integration of their existing Machinery Health Manager and Operator Rounds inspections. This work process carries over to these datasources as well.

It will look a lot like another reliability project I’m involved with closer to home in the UK but with SAP PM as the CMMS —the subject of my next blog post!